Wasteland of Flint

Aboard the Palenque

Hummingbird swung onto the bridge of the Company spacecraft and paused, one hand on the railing leading up to the captain's command station. There was no threat-well, no gleaming banks of combat monitors, no subdued lighting or perfect climate control. Instead, bights of ratty wire and conduit hung from open panels in the overhead, there was an acrid, burnt smell in the air, and a racket of chattering comm feeds hissed from the communications station. Most of the control panels were dark and the deck had an uneven, mottled quality.

Lieutenant Isoroku started to say something, but the tlamatinime shook his head slightly.

"I've seen a damaged ship before, Sho-sa," he said quietly. His interest fixed on a panoramic view of the planet below — a sharp dun-red crescent silhouetted against ebon night, with the peaks of the Escarpment beginning to glow in the morning sun. Somewhere down there, Russovsky found a book and a weapon — not so unalike. And where there is one, there will be others.…

Hummingbird pushed himself to the main comm panel, scarred fingers brushing over the controls. "How awake is main comp — "

"Hsst! Who are you, stranger?" A sharp, inhuman voice cut across the tlamatinime's question. "Stand away from my station!"

Hummingbird turned and found the brawny shape of Isoroku blocking the movement of the Hesht female onto the bridge. The engineer's back was tense, though nothing in comparison to the slitted eyes and flattened ear-tufts of the alien. Enraged, the Hesht loomed over the human, her long arms poised to slam the engineer out of the way.

"I am Green Hummingbird," the Mйxica said, putting a warning hand on Isoroku's shoulder. His voice was very firm and he met Magdalena's eyes squarely. "I am an Imperial Officer from the Cornuelle. There is no cause for territorial dispute, ss'shuma Magdalena. Your pride hunts for mine, and I have need of your place-of-watching."

Magdalena bared her teeth, circling through the darkened, inactive navigator's station, glittering nails digging into the backs of the seats to propel herself along. "You may be queens-pride, old crow, but you are not welcome here! Look, if you must, but keep your dirty paws to yourself."

Hummingbird felt a flash of irritation — one he suppressed before the emotion could color his face or make him react — and gave Isoroku a little push. "My thanks, Isoroku-san. I will comm if I have need of anything."

The engineer, still watching Magdalena with a wary eye, made a sharp, properly polite bow and swam off down the access tube. The Hesht watched him go with undiluted, unfeigned hatred burning in her yellow eyes. The claws of her right hand slipped reflexively out of bony sheaths, then retracted. Hummingbird kicked away from the deck and drifted into her direct line of sight.

"Sho-sa Isoroku is not one of your hunting-pride," he said, catching her attention. "He takes food from the kill of Hadeishi, who drinks from my watering holes. Do you understand me, ss'hi' a?"

Magdalena bristled at the word, black lips curling away from gleaming white teeth. "I am not a child! Insult me again, monkey, and — "

"You will do what?" Hummingbird drifted closer, ignoring the bared claws. Startled at his boldness, Magdalena backed up. "You will lose your temper? Attack me, without the pack-leader's permission? Have your entire pride seized and imprisoned, this ship-den impounded by the Imperial Navy?"

The Hesht flinched as if struck, then her anger surged, a deep rumbling in the back of her throat. Hummingbird refused to move, refused to show any reaction at all. Magdalena stood poised and stiff for a moment, then suddenly gave ground. Her tail was twitching, both ears flat against the long angular skull. "What…what do you want?"

"A civil reception," Hummingbird said, testily. "Where is Anderssen-tzin? On the planet?"

"Yes," Magdalena hissed, twitching from head to toe. She swung gracefully over into the comm station seat, one leg bracing against the command panel. "She's just returned to the base camp."

"And the other scientists? Where are they?" Hummingbird took care to remain standing, so he could look down on the Hesht from at least a tiny height. The bitter smell of tension in the air was beginning to abate, but he did not wish to give up any advantage.

Magdalena pointed sullenly at a v-pane showing orbital tracks, the ring of satellites and various other objects in near-Ephesian space. "Bandao-tzin is carrying them in shuttle one; they will be docking here in an hour and fifty minutes. The other shuttle is still groundside."

"All of the scientists? What about the security team?" Hummingbird chanted the names of the men and women on the surface — a quick mnemonic to remind him of their names, faces, specialties — under his breath.

"Not all." Magdalena's eyes narrowed again, yellow-amber wedges reflecting the intermittent glow of the instrument panels. "Our stray sister is still lost and Gretchen is hunting planetside until tomorrow. Blake and Parker and Fuentes are with her."

"Russovsky." Hummingbird nodded, remembering, and then turned a sharp eye on the Hesht. "You've not made contact with her by comm? Her ultralight is fully equipped, by my memory."

"She does not answer. Radar scans have not found her. The planet is large — perhaps you should go look yourself." Magdalena yawned derisively, showing a forest of razor-sharp teeth. "I am looking, but our search is slowed by the damage suffered by the Palenque. Maybe your pride helps, if you want to catch this stray kupil? Hadeishi's ship has excellent eyes."

Hummingbird did not respond. He was watching the time-to-dock estimate for shuttle one and considering which path was swiftest to his goal. Russovsky could lead us to her discovery site immediately, he thought. But these others will have seen, done things on the planet as well. They are often jealous creatures — they may have withheld knowledge from one another, even from their public logs and records. He sighed, estimating the time he would need to interrogate each of the macehualli technicians. Ah, but the tenacious Anderssen will want to find Russovsky for herself. Let us not duplicate our efforts. Hummingbird looked up, catching the Hesht making an insulting face.

"I am lair-guest, for a time, ss'shuma." He made a pointing motion with his nose. "I will not disturb your efforts to repair the ship. Good day." With that, he sprang easily into the mouth of the access tube and then swam down into the main passage. Behind him, there was a spitting hiss, but nothing so loud or obvious he needed to take notice.

Hummingbird shook his head, coming to light at the entryway to the hab ring. "A waste of time," he said to himself, eyeing the various cabin doors. Some of the locks were dimly lit with the closed hand of a privacy lock, others were entirely dark. But I am impatient, he realized, feeling the queer, nibbling attraction of the cylinder and its contents. This is not good.

He found an unused cabin and tapped on his comm. "Sergeant Fitzsimmons? Yes, this is Hummingbird. I have some things by the number one airlock. Can you bring them to…" He read out the cabin number, then set about testing the lights, shower, refresher. Most things seemed to be working. The common, everyday motions served to settle his nerves.

A particularly disturbing thought had occurred to him.

What, he mused, if the planet itself is a lure? So obviously shaped, marked with the tread of the First Sun people…any spacefaring race would light here and be intrigued. Then — scattered about, perhaps the cylinders are only one such bait — some dangerous items, some helpful devices. These things have happened before. But is the trap here on Ephesus, or are we picking up marker dye to lead something homeward?

By the time Fitzsimmons and Deckard arrived with his baggage — and he'd brought everything from the Cornuelle save the little shrine to the Lady of Tepeyac — Hummingbird had disassembled the in-cabin comm panel and was wiring the data conduit to take his portable comps.

"Master Hummingbird?" The sergeant paused in the doorway, surprised to find the wizened old man surrounded by a cloud of components and glassite panels. "Do you need help? I can call Iso — "

"No, thank you." Hummingbird looked up, measuring the two men with a critical eye. He was not displeased with what he saw. Even aboard this ship, the Marines were carrying their weapons and tools, within a moment's notice of combat readiness. "Put those things there, yes, against the wall."

Hummingbird watched them move, and was pleased to see they were entirely at home in the z-g environment of the ship. Well trained, he thought. A fine pair of tools. They should not be wasted.

"Tomorrow morning," the tlamatinime said, drawing their attention. "You'll go down to the planet in shuttle one. There is — if you had not heard — a scientist missing from the team. A woman named Russovsky. Find and secure this woman and return her — alive, unharmed — to the ship."

"Aye, sir." Fitzsimmons seemed startled, pleased and concerned all at once. "With civilian help, or without?"

"Make use of their pilots," Hummingbird said. "Anderssen will be eager to find her as well. By tomorrow night, I want everyone off the planet with a minimum of fuss."

The sergeant nodded sharply, then spun backward out of the door. Deckard followed, and both men shot away down the curving hallway of the hab ring. Hummingbird closed the door, then pressed the small round shape of a privacy bomb against the wall. The device shivered, then winked blue. The tlamatinime felt his skin crawl, but the sensation of being watched faded away.

"Curious, curious cats," he said softly, easing himself back into the cocoon of comp parts and conduit feeds. "Out of my house…"

"I'm a pap-sucking kitten, am I?" Magdalena's claw adjusted a filter control minutely. A jittery, scrambled image of the Mйxica nauallis flickered, jumped, then cleared. The comm panel on the bridge of the Palenque was alive with v-panes, showing dozens of feeds from all over the ship, from Fitzsimmons and Deckard's z-suits, even from Isoroku's navy workrig. The Hesht bared all her teeth, then lashed her tail twice before settling down into the shockchair. "A hunter sees, a kit hides. Now, what are you doing, little bird?"

As it happened, Hummingbird was still assembling his comps, though Magdalena found the specifics of his equipment very interesting. Still, he was likely to be busy for a few hours. The Hesht turned her attention to the two Marines. After watching them for a few moments, her attention wandered. Her own kind might have amused her for hours, but these slick, shiny pink things…her claw idled over a glyph, then tapped out a save-for-later. "Males getting ready for the hunt. Hrrrr…boring. But hunt-sister might like to see. Hmm dee hmm."

A task-glyph popped to the top of her work queue — one marked with Anderssen's rabbit-ear symbol. Magdalena sniffed disdainfully — More housekeeping, she thought, then tapped the message open with a shining white claw. A still of Gretchen's face appeared, nearly unrecognizable behind a broad hat, the respirator mask and work goggles. "Maggie, I've remembered something — Russovsky didn't have a single letter in her t-relay queue when I printed out the mail last night — can you check to see if she ever got anything from home? Seems strange… Talk to you tomorrow."

"No mail?" Magdalena shifted in her chair and tapped up the message logs from ship's comm. In her experience, humans loved to talk more than anything — one of them actually keeping quiet did seem very odd. Maybe she's sick or something… Let's see.

The t-relay had never gone down, though the massive power failure on the Palenque had knocked out the message queuing system interface with shipboard comm. Magdalena hadn't done more to restart the t-relay than restore normal power and re-init shipside systems. As a result, she hadn't needed to navigate the obtuse and entirely military interface for the relay logs before.

An hour passed in increasing, tail-chewing disgust before she managed to find the interface for viewing traffic statistics. Then she found an entire security module had been deactivated in the transfer to civilian control, which had disabled the usual logging features. Three hours later, the Hesht was carefully keeping her tail curled under the shockchair, and a section of light construction-grade metal paneling was floating in tiny pieces around her like a constellation of broken, blue-gray moons.

"There! Finally…" Magdalena scanned through the message queue storage facility. Her initial feeling of triumph faded quickly. The queue storage subsystem was encrypted and her commercial decrypt soft said the jumbled hash of characters and letters was a military code. Maggie reached out and dug her claws into the back of the command station behind her, tearing another section of paneling away. It felt good to feel something rend between her claws. "So…so how are readable messages coming through at all?"

She broke into the current t-relay queue and glanced over two of the messages. They were as readable and plain as any human letter could be. Brow furrowed, the little claw on her smallest finger tapping against her left incisor, Maggie began tracing the interface between the public messaging system and the relay. After thirty minutes, she was curled up into a tight ball, only the horizontal yellow gleam of her eyes visible over her arm. A constant stream of what seemed to be garbage — code, machine dumps, encrypted text — drifted past on her panel. Her usage of main comp had crept up into the sixteen percent range, billions of cycles diverted to a multitiered array of searches, all trying to winkle out the encrypt key protecting the storage system.

A chime sounded, waking Magdalena from a dream filled with tiny green birds fluttering around her head, each one singing in an annoying voice, flitting only millimeters from her grasping claws. She uncoiled, staring at the panel. A queue flag had popped up, bearing the ideogram code encapsulating Russovsky's comm ID. Magdalena frowned, then her claws skittered across the panel, diverting the message into unencrypted storage and starting a system trace to find where it had come from.

"Addressed to Ctesiphon Station?" Maggie shook her head, blinking, and stared again at the message routing header. The sizeable message — several gigabytes in length — was slated to go outbound on the r-relay at a very low priority. The Hesht frowned, looking over the routing instructions, which were much longer than the usual Please send four quills for a new pelt brush. "Dispatch only during dead-time? No…in sections, to a commbox on station, to be forwarded…"

Her tail started to lash again, very, very slowly. "What a clever monkey. She's hacked the t-relay!"

Hummingbird's face lit with the soft glow of a display panel, weary old eyes glittering with the spark of glyphs flashing awake. Reassembling his surveillance systems had taken much longer than he expected — he'd considered calling Isoroku for help — but resisted the urge. There was really no reason to let the engineer see Mirror equipment in operation, not when the man was entirely competent and a boon to his ship. Dealing with an angry Chu-sa Hadeishi would only waste more time. So Hummingbird stretched in place, broke open a threesquare and swallowed the vile mixture. Four panels faced him — a control display between his knees — then three v-panes in a wing. To his left, an array of local camera feeds showed him the corridors and rooms of the ship, now suddenly crowded by the arrival of the scientists from the planet. To his right, a mirror of the planetary view maintained on the bridge shimmered in the display.

Despite his earlier decision to let Anderssen and her people find the missing scientist, a thought had occurred to Hummingbird while he was working. Setting up a search will only take a moment, he said, arguing with himself. Then they can make the pickup themselves.

In truth, the scientists were all taxing the water and power supply of the ship with a half-dozen simultaneous, extended showers. After that they'd want to stuff themselves with food — Hummingbird smiled, noting the shipboard mess was entirely barren, save for the same kind of threesquares the crew had been subjected to on the planet — and sleep. So I have a few moments to spare.

He tapped up a schematic of the coverage afforded by the meteorological satellites the expedition had deployed in a long string around the planetary equator. The weather surveillance system managed nearly pole to pole coverage. "Good," he said with a trace of smugness. "Now show me what kind of video feed…"

More images flashed past on his displays. The peapods maintained an historical archive, which Hummingbird pillaged, looking for a highview shot of the base camp the day Russovsky delivered her deadly cylinder. A second later, the system chirped apologetically — the satellite array did not contain information older than a week. "Odd…" Hummingbird tapped up specifics on the Texcoco ISA-built satellites. "Ah, too much data to store locally." He queried main comp to see if there was an off-array archive. Moments later, an answer came back: a partial archive was maintained in crystal storage at base camp, in the laboratory of Smalls, Victor A., doctoral candidate, Mars Academy of Sciences.

Hummingbird nodded, glad the young man had taken proper care to protect his work. Seconds later, the main comm array had thrown a whisker to the base-camp station, and Hummingbird's search was causing dozens of pale firefly lights to wink on in Smalls's crowded lab. An entire wall of c-storage rippled awake in response to the tlamatinime's request.

On the ship, Hummingbird sat back, eyes closed, breathing steady, waiting.

"Gretchen? Are you awake?" Magdalena bit nervously at a length of metallic support strut, leaving dimpled marks along the black metal. "It's Magdalena, hunt-sister. Are you mating? Cleaning yourself? Answer, please!"

"I'm here," came the muffled reply. The vid showed nothing, only darkness. Impatient, Maggie dialed up the light amp and image interpolate on the channel. This revealed the matte surface of a sleepbag, which then split open to reveal the mussed, tousled head of a very sleepy Anderssen. "What happened?"

"I think…oh, a fine hunt! I think I've found ss'shuma Russovsky." Magdalena grinned tightly, careful to keep her teeth covered, but the pink tip of her tongue poked gleefully between her lips. "At least, I know where she was sixteen hours ago, when the sun came up."

"Okay." The image of Gretchen rubbed her eyes and a giant hand reached out to adjust the comm band so she could see Magdalena. "Tell me."

"I was trying to find Russovsky's mail — like you asked — and I couldn't. Very strange, but then a message processed through the Palenque main comm array — a message from Russovsky's Midge, from the groundside — and my watchers picked it up. Hunt-sister, the doctor didn't have any mail waiting for her because she's been picking it up all this time!"

Gretchen, wondering why her mouth tasted so foul, managed a "Huh?"

Maggie looked off-screen for a moment, her ears pricked up. "The Midge houses a comm array in the upper wing, a big, broad surface. A great transmitter and receiver. So Russovsky changed her messaging configuration here on the ship — I found where she broke into the system and tweaked some access settings — so her Midge could connect to the Palenque on a maintenance channel and transmit her messages. The burst I intercepted was big — because it's filled with video from the cameras on the ultralight — and she uploads every morning."

Gretchen blinked. "Wait — so she's keeping a record of where she flew during the day?"

"Better," Maggie grinned, and this time she didn't bother to hide her fangs. "She's transmitting all of her data from the geosensors on the Midge; each day she flies, she's mapping the planetary surface, taking gravity measurements, even spectroscope of exposed rock formations…everything she can pick up."

"Ah." Gretchen felt her mind begin to work, sleep-rusty gears ticking over. "But her data doesn't go through a known channel — and nothing that Clarkson would notice. So everything's stored in Palenque main comp?"

The Hesht's ears flicked and a queer, pleased gleam spilled into her eyes. "Not at all. The Midge sends the data here with a tail-twister of a routing header — notes on where the message should go, who it's intended for — to sit on the t-relay until main comm traffic is low. Then Russovsky's message wakes up and sends itself to Ctesiphon Station. She lets it break up into sections if need be, so if there's a lot of traffic, her entire message won't get through for a couple hours. But once at the big emitter on Ctesiphon, it gets forwarded all the way to the University of Aberdeen, on Anбhuac!"

"She's sending the data to herself, at home, in her lab." Gretchen made a face. Her tongue tasted strange. I am never drinking Blake's "special" vodka again. Ever. No matter how much he begs. "That's very clever. She's not paying for the transmission time, is she?"

Maggie laughed out loud, a rumbling, crackling cough. "The accounting system here, and on Ctesiphon, always allows a certain amount of synchronization traffic between relays. Each station has to identify itself and make sure messages are passing properly between them. Russovsky's data goes over in the checksum of the synchro packets, or attached to other messages. If anyone pays, it's the Company."

"Fine. Fine." Gretchen didn't really care about the technical details. "The comm array has to get a fix on her transmitter then, right?"

The Hesht nodded. "I have a fix, to the centimeter, of where she set down at sunrise today. She's flying tonight, I suppose, but when she transmits in the morning…"

"Tell Fitzsimmons and Bandao to gear up," Gretchen said, lying back down, the sleepbag helpfully curling up around her shoulders. "They need to be ready to drop shuttle one as soon as you've got a fix and pick her up. Bring her back to the ship. Parker and I will come up in the other shuttle as soon as we can."

Maggie nodded, but Gretchen was asleep and snoring softly before the channel flickered closed.

Hummingbird's eyes opened and he looked expectantly at his display. A moment later there was a chiming sound and a v-pane unfolded with the results of his search. Smalls had been capturing an enormous amount of data — the entire planetary surface in visual, plus air temperature and density scans — for weeks and weeks. Scanning such a volume, looking for the silhouette of an ultralight flying a low altitude, proved far more time consuming than the tlamatinime expected. Now he unfolded himself from a waiting posture and tapped the first of the search results.

A highview shot of a Midge sitting on the landing field at base camp appeared.

"No…" Hummingbird flipped through the rest of the results. None of them were useful, though each picture was — with clouds, dust and other interference scrubbed away — a fine picture of a Midge-class ultralight seen from above. "Strange. Why only base camp? Oh, I see…"

Smiling at his own naivetГ©, Hummingbird expanded his search criteria to include an aircraft in flight, one where the silhouette changed as the ultralight banked or turned, or the recorded image was only partial due to heavy clouds or sandstorms. The search started again and he began reciting a long memory chant to pass the time.

"Even if a man were poor, lowly," he sang, "even if his mother and his father were the poorest of the poor, his lineage is not considered. Only the matter of his life matters, the purity of his heart, his good and humane heart, his stout — "

Another chime interrupted, which made Hummingbird frown suspiciously. "That's too quick!"

He tapped up the image, expecting to find a sand dune or rocky flat. Instead, the glittering shape of an aircraft wing catching the sun was frozen in the satellite picture. Hummingbird blinked in surprise, then zoomed the image. And again. At first the image was blurry, barely the shadow of an angular shape against a field of shattered black lava, then the display panel kicked in and the view sharpened. The tlamatinime pursed his lips. He'd found an aircraft — but not Russovsky's ultralight — or one of the Javan Yards shuttles from the Palenque. Something else, something without Company markings.

"Show me the rest," he muttered, dialing forward. Far below, in Smalls's lab, one particular c-storage lattice woke to life, reeling off snapshots of the planetary surface taken weeks before. On Hummingbird's panel, a jerky series of images spun past. But the mysterious shuttle was already gone. He backed up, frame by frame, then realized with disgust that Smalls's satellites were only shooting an image every half hour — more than enough time to track a storm, but not swift enough to capture more than an instant of a shuttle's swift passage through the atmosphere.

"Where did you go?" Hummingbird began composing a more detailed search. At the same time he kicked the one image to the Cornuelle's main comp for identification. Then he waited, pondering the grainy, low-def image on his v-pane. The ident came back moments later and Hummingbird nodded, unsurprised, at the identification.

"A Valkyrie," he read from main comp's concise, clipped summary. "Mining shuttle, one hundred fifty tons displacement, four engines, sub-light capable. Usually paired with a Tyr-class mobile refinery." A schematic of the spacecraft was attached — a huge assemblage of ore tanks, drives and shuttle bays. Hummingbird was not familiar with the class of ship — he rarely devoted his attention to navy matters — but the manufacturer was well known to him from certain other business. His lip curled. "Ship design and construction by Norsktrad Heavy Industries, Kiruna system. A Swedish ship…"

The destruction of the ancient Kingdom of Swedish-Russia on Anбhuac in the previous century had not prevented tens of thousands of Swedes and Russians from leaving the homeworld for the colonies. Indeed, strict Imperial control of their home provinces had probably precipitated the exodus into the outer worlds. Entire companies — some once no more than Swedish governmental departments — had moved offworld as well. Two cold, desolate worlds — yet still habitable — orbiting Kiruna Prime were the center of a thriving manufacturing and shipbuilding industry.

No one, particularly not the Voice of the Mirror, could say the Kirunan companies engaged in treacherous acts. Such an event would have precipitated the destruction of both the colonies and their orbital habitats. Despite this — despite a scrupulous and timely payment of taxes and every outward sign of loyal service to the Empire — far too many Kirunan-built spacecraft found their way into the hands of pirates, rogue miners, Communards, and insurrectionists of all kinds.

"Hummingbird to the Cornuelle," he said, tapping open his comm. "I need to speak with Chu-sa Hadeishi immediately."